Design at Zello

I wrote this for our internal design wiki to colorfully answer “what does Design do?” when we’re sharing opinions on shipping work. Reprinting here, both for larger discussion and potentially for upcoming hires.

It’s difficult to write about one’s work when caring more about craft—I’m no Design Evangelist. I love Design as a field and craft, but I don’t talk much about what Design is or what Design does. I like to show more than I like to tell, and that does a poor job at scale.

Design’s shape is ambiguous.^[1] That said, Design is a number of things, and so is Design at Zello.

Design is the way of things—the way things are crafted, built, and experienced. In this way, everyone’s a designer. Backend engineers design APIs, and salespeople implicitly and explicitly design customer journeys. This is Design, but not Design at Zello.

Design at Zello is specifically responsible for the visual design, UI, and UX of our Android, iOS, and Desktop apps. We’re responsible for that of Zello Bridge, Zello Kiosk, and zello.com. We pride ourselves in helping to craft easy-to-use products that are not only better than the competition—often, that bar is low—but that also delight our end users. We’re responsible for the Zello brand—from screen and print assets, to icon libraries and copywriting guides and brand voice. It’s in this same multidisciplinary perspective that Zello Design is responsible for the engineering and maintenance of zello.com—the way of things is not limited to a specific medium, and so one finds engineers, but also prototypers, researchers, and others, amongst designers.

Design as a field is unconstrained, and is rather a mindset, process, and set of broad skills that can be applied across different projects.

If Design is this amorphous, what delineates it from other crafts? Everyone designs, but what makes a Designer, and what makes a Designer at Zello?

Designers are specifically concerned with the how of solving a problem—a product manager has identified an impactful problem, or a marketer needs a campaign, and a designer delivers the how. The Designer is concerned not just with the production, but judges their outcomes based on audience understanding—how does the end user interact with our product? How does the end user utilize a newly shipped feature? Design differs from art in that art’s success is not market-determined, whereas design exists within a marketplace in part differentiated via usability and novelty.

Our designers judge their work through an often personal lens of aesthetic and craft, and an impersonal, broader, user-centered lens. We bolster that broader lens via heuristic evaluations, usability testing, and other reality checks. Craft is both subjective and communal, but we work against biased subjectivity.

The Design I practice and build at Zello is an intersection of what gets it built, and designers at Zello are expected to occupy that intersection of crafts which get it done.